For the past ten years, O'Reilly's Oracle PL/SQL Programming has been the bestselling book on PL/SQL, Oracle's powerful procedural language. Packed with examples and helpful recommendations, the book has helped everyone--from novices to experienced developers, and from Oracle Forms developers to database administrators--make the most of PL/SQL.

The fourth edition is a comprehensive update, adding significant new content and extending coverage to include the very latest Oracle version, Oracle Database 10g Release 2. It describes such new features as the PL/SQL optimizing compiler, conditional compilation, compile-time warnings, regular expressions, set operators for nested tables, nonsequential collections in FORALL, the programmer-defined quoting mechanism, the ability to backtrace an exception to a line number, a variety of new built-in packages, and support for IEEE 754 compliant floating-point numbers.

Co-authored by the world's foremost PL/SQL authority, Steven Feuerstein, this classic reference provides language syntax, best practices, and extensive code, ranging from simple examples to complete applications--making it a must-have on your road to PL/SQL mastery. A companion web site contains many more examples and additional technical content for enhanced learning.

Steven Feuerstein

Steven Feuerstein is considered the world's leading expert on the Oracle PL/SQL language and an excellent evangelist for the book and the PL/SQL language in general. He travels extensively, giving seminars, keynote addresses, and technical presentations at database conferences. He writes for Oracle Magazine and other publications, and is the most popular "columnist" for the Oracle Technology Network (OTN), which gets several million hits a month. He is a very popular writer and speaker, well known and respected by Oracle Corporation and its users worldwide.

Bill Pribyl

Bill Pribyl, author, teacher, and software consultant, is the primary author of Learning Oracle PL/SQL, and the co-author of Oracle PL/SQL Programming and its companion pocket reference, all published by O'Reilly Media. An Oracle user since 1986, Bill has consulted on many aspects of using Oracle products. He recently spearheaded PLNet.org, a Web-based repository where developers can share open source PL/SQL.

Ants are featured on the cover of Oracle PL /SQL Programming, Fourth Edition. At least 8,000 different species of ants can be found everywhere on Earth except the North and South Poles. Ants preserved in amber suggest that these insects existed 50 million years before humans.Humans have long been fascinated by ants, because these tiny insects are accomplished builders, nurses, miners, and even farmers. Fables such as "The Ant and the Grasshopper" extol the virtues of hardworking, forward-looking ants. (Hail ants!) It is true that individual ants are able to perform amazing feats: an ant can carry up to 50 times its body weight, can travel the human equivalent of 40 miles a day, and can climb vertical heights the equivalent of Mount Everest. However, the greatest accomplishments of ants are those performed together for the good of their community.Queen ants establish new communities, or nests, after their mating flight. On this flight the queen mates with several males. After mating, the males fall to Earth and die. The queen then finds an uninhabited nest, settles into it, and pulls her wings off. She will never fly again, and after removing her wings she is able to absorb the wing muscles as nutrients for her eggs. She will continue to lay eggs, thousands of them, for years.During the three-stage development process, which takes about two months, the eggs, larvae, and pupae are cared for by the nurse ants, who feed, clean, and carefully move the young to warmer or cooler places in the nest, depending on the temperature. These nurse ants are, in turn, cared for by other worker ants, who feed the nurses with regurgitated food. The workers and the nurses will fight together to defend the young against enemies if the nest is invaded, either by another group of ants or by a larger animal.Mary Anne Weeks Mayo was the production editor and copyeditor for Oracle PL/SQL Programming, Fourth Edition . Matt Hutchinson, Mary Brady, and Marlowe Shaeffer provided quality control. Ellen Troutman Zaig wrote the index.Edie Freedman designed the cover of this book. The cover image is a 19th-century engraving from the Dover Pictorial Archive. Karen Montgomery produced the cover layout with Adobe InDesign CS using Adobe's ITC Garamond font.David Futato designed the interior layout. This book was converted to FrameMaker 5.5.6 by Keith Fahlgren with a format conversion tool created by Erik Ray, Jason McIntosh, Neil Walls, and Mike Sierra that uses Perl and XML technologies. The text font is Linotype Birka; the heading font is Adobe Myriad Condensed; and the code font is LucasFont's TheSans Mono Condensed. The illustrations that appear in the book were produced by Robert Romano, Jessamyn Read, and Lesley Borash using Macromedia FreeHand MX and Adobe Photoshop CS. The tip and warning icons were drawn by Christopher Bing. This colophon was written by Clairemarie Fisher O'Leary.

I have used the book to prepare to my OCA PL/SQL Developer exams and I have to say, that it is the best book about PL/SQL Programming I've ever read. It's really well-written and you read it almost like a crime story. It describes every aspect of language and is detailed, but not boring.The only problem is it's weight.

I downloaded O'Reilly's electronic version of this book, and I have to add the eBook version is also worth it's weight in gold.

Not only is the information in this book incredibly useful to any Oracle developer, but the eBook version adds extra usefulness and portability on a Laptop or mobile device that makes it something you can have on hand at all times.

So once again... the eBook version? Literally worth its weight in pure gold. In fact, they should have called it Aurical PL/SQL Programming.

I have developed an application or two using PL/SQL (even used Oracle forms & Reports) but I learnt PL/SQL on the go by googling; never found the time to sit down and learn it from the scratch-from the very basics.

I was hoping that this book will add some basic and some advanced stuff to my knowledge *very quickly*; that was where I went wrong-it took quite some time and effort to finish it.

Pluses:

This book is worth its weight in gold; very clear very concise; lots of explanations and lots of code. An ideal companion for quick referencing while you are coding in PL/SQL. I had to spend a long time on the net once to understand how I/O and web based data is handled; I wish I had this book with me at that time.

Minuses:

This book is certainly not for beginners. At 1170 pages it&#8217;d mean a lot of information for somebody who has just started learning. There are some (actually a lot!) printing errors, even in the code that need to be taken care of.

It is not so often when i can read a book that is really useful in my every-developer-day.

For PL/SQL programmers it is really the 'MUST HAVE' book.

Every chapter is really full of useful informations and tips on the Oracle 10gR2.

It gives me a real new interest in going deeper into efficient PL/SQL development (a sincere thank you to S.Feuerstein for this major book).

Reading that book, i have also discovered other very useful tools (like Ounit and utPLSQL) developped by the author.

Until now, i was mainly focused on ORACLE PRESS BOOKS (considering that they were supposed to always be the best to provide useful informations to Oracle developpers).

Unfortunalely i discovered that most of the money i spent into Oracle Press books was not so profitable (the lastest Oracle PL/SQL 10g is a real shame compared to this book).

=> I had to spent lot of time trying to find solutions or simply practical explanation on Internet.

If i had only one remark to the author of the 'Oracle PL/SQL Programming' release 4, it would deal with the miss of a chapter for programming PLSQL/XML (as it is supposed to be the most useful format these days !!!) => i have not found a very practical book on that subject.